Friday, October 17, 2014

Clients and friends know that for a long, long time I've used Linux as my primary development environment. There were a few years when I did .NET work, which required a Windows machine, but once I transitioned away from Microsoft's ecosystem it made no sense to work in an environment where your the cost of your developer tools and services start nearing the 4 digit range. (this was before BizSpark and DreamSpark or whatever Microsoft are calling their programs now a days).

I used to run Ubuntu back when it was on Gnome 2. When Unity came out, it was better than Gnome 2 by a long shot (anything was better than Gnome 2, honestly), but it was glitchy and annoying. Around that time I started dabbling with Gnome 3, and after a few weeks started running that hacked-up version of Gnome 3's "Gnome Shell" someone published to a PPA.

It was a blast. While it had its fair share of bugs, it was mostly stable and the design kept things out of my way, unlike Unity's schizophrenic global menu and obtrusive dock. Of course, as Ubuntu progressed, Canonical decided to do things their own way, and support for Gnome 3 became poorer and poorer -- first it was default Gnome 3 apps that were missing, then Gnome Online Accounts was MIA, and then Gnome 3 was stuck at some ancient version full of paper-cut style annoyances.

I think it was maybe a year ago or more when I decided to start clean with Fedora.

And let me tell you, a clean Gnome 3 install is night and day than what is (probably) still shipping with Ubuntu. I had no idea how much I was missing until I started using Fedora. It's been a good year -- but it's been a really annoying few months recently.

I can't remember where it started, but I had a need to download a program that offered a Linux version. So, fine, I'll just -- oh, it only offers a .deb. For Ubuntu.

And that's how it started. A few days later (maybe a week), I was out fishing for another pretty polished application that offered Linux support... except not really: it only offered me a .deb.

Now, I hate both rpms and debs. I'll take a binary .tar.gz any day of the week: I don't like giving random packages on the Internet sudo privileges. I've also seen what it takes to make an RPM and I'm not surprised that their first choice is going to be a deb file if they do any kind of package at all.

Anyway, my point is that once I started leaving the "safety" of Fedora's repositories I discovered that in the "real world" Linux support is actually Ubuntu support and damn everyone else. You can probably download the sources and compile everything yourself -- I did that with Atom for a long time -- but it's still a pain in the ass. Atom, by the way, recently offered support for Linux -- sorry, Ubuntu.

I don't want to run Ubuntu. I don't like Unity's interface. I don't want to deal with whatever frankenstein Gnome 3 they have going on. I am picky, and my days of fiddling with distributions is well behind me.

Gnome 3(.12), by the way, still needs a lot of love. Over the year on Fedora, I've had the following random problems:

* Computer seems to have frozen, but the monitors are off so I can't actually tell what happened. Can't wake the monitors up -- is the computer not outputting a video signal? Who knows.
* The login widget on the lock-screen just... disappears after I click it. Nothing but a slate-gray oasis awaits.
* Sometimes it freezes up. Sometimes. I'm not sure why. Or how.

I don't know how to even begin to reproduce these things, or what logs I should look at, or if it even matters to anyone but me.

Tonight, for the first time since I've had it (2+ years), my Macbook Pro froze. I held down the power button and restarted it. It told me that the computer had been restarted because there was a problem. It asked me if I wanted to start-up the programs I was running before the crash. I said OK. Everything was fine.

It works. Homebrew exists. Applications that are multi-platform run on it without an asterisk. The performance is stable.

I've been using it for my full-time dev work for about a month now. It's an experiment. So far I'm enjoying it.

It's not really one thing that's driving me from Linux distros, but really a multitude of things. Openshot crashes, a lot. Pitivi... ... I'm not even sure the people who develop Pitivi use it. Why is Audacity showing me all these audio inputs when none of them have anything plugged in? Why is all this crossplatform software flowing in from Windows and OS X not really crossplatform? Why is pretty much every open source driver blacklisted in Chrome's WebGL implementation?

There are things I find annoying about OS X -- it's shitty file manager is suspect #1 -- but everything else just works, and I'm OK with that. Hopefully in 3-5 years using RPM / Deb for applications will fall out of style, and a focus on usability will be present in the next generation of applications.

I only got the Macbook Pro because a client had an environment with a L2PT / IPSEC VPN that could only be successfully logged in via Windows / OS X. The bug was documented on some unattended BugZilla installation somewhere years ago. Of course the earnings from the contract was vastly larger than the infuriating sum is cost me to buy the Macbook, so it was a no brainer, but the entire time I kept thinking "I could have bought 2 really good laptops for this price."